weekend, on c-span3. you are watching american history tv, 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span3. follow us on twitter, @cspanhistory, for information on our schedule and to keep up with the latest history news. >> the storied texas rangers marks the 200th anniversary in 2023. next on american history tv, we hear about the history behind the myths from doug swanson, author of "cult of glory: the bold and brutal history of the texas rangers." while the rangers emerged out of a wild and violent texas, he argues it's time to confront atrocities they committed against native americans, african americans, and mexicans. the falmouth, massachusetts museums on the green hosted this event and provided the video.

>> the rangers -- doug: the rangers are one of the most famous law-enforcement organizations in the world. i would put them up with scotland yard, canadian police, the fbi, that sort of thing. they have been around longer than any state law enforcement organization in the united states. they have this worldwide image. that is what i am going to explore a little bit tonight. how they got this image, what this image is, but i think we all have some idea of what a texas ranger is. maybe from tv's and movies, if nothing else. that was my first exposure to the rangers. growing up in florida, i watched this disney show called texas john slaughter. some of you may have seen that. the theme song was texas john

slaughter, made them do what they outta, because if they didn't they would die. the lone ranger may be the most most cinematic -- most famous of the cinematic, tv, and radio rangers that started in 1933. out of wxyz in detroit. the script was originally called "man hunter." but then they changed it to "lone ranger." i don't think if it would have stayed as man hunter that we would still be talking about it today. the rangers have been in hundreds of movies. there have been hundreds of books written about them, hundreds of magazine and newspaper stories. that is how the image was built. i will go into that a little more as we get further into this. first, i want to give a brief history of the rangers, and then talk about why the texas rangers have residence and a place in a

conversation we're having now, nationally, about police brutality and approaches to history, and all this taking down of the confederate monuments. the rangers have a place in that too. so we will talk about it at the end. i will try to toggle to vintage photos. this is the first time i have done this. i told mark that, so if i mess up, i'm sorry. i have my technical assistant and lovely wife to my side to help me if we mess up, but i will try to pull of photos and do a slideshow. >> [inaudible] doug: i hope everybody is seeing that. good. this is lone wolf gonzalez. famous texas ranger in the 1930's, 1940's, and 1950's. he was a sharp dresser.

he has the custom boots on. the lone wolf was, by all accounts, a good ranger. and we have to say, before we get rolling, there are many rangers who were heroic, upright honorable, courageous, valorous individuals who performed a valuable public service in texas. whether you agree or not, whether the anglos should have settled texas, setting that aside, texas would not be texas without the rangers. they were an extraordinarily invaluable force starting in 1823. we have to say there were many werefic people who rangers, and there continue to be. so i don't want to attack the rangers, but i want to get behind the myth of the rangers themselves. lone wolf gonzales gives us a good example. he was a good ranger, but quite concerned with his public image. there was a saying, i know you

heard this applied to other politicians, but there was no more dangerous place in texas -- loneween loan wolf gonzales and a camera. when he finished being a ranger he rode off to hollywood and became a tv show consultant. he put forth his own public image. it was said that he killed 75 men as a ranger. that was untrue, but he never disavowed that. he claimed to be descended from spanish royalty. he claimed to have fought in the mexican army as a mexican soldier, that was not true. one time, a reporter was hanging out with him and they ended up spending the night together in a hotel. i don't mean to imply there was anything strange going on. there was no other rooms in the town where they were. the reporter woke up that morning and saw the lone wolf

shaving, at his mirror with his hat and boots on, nothing else. lone wolf explained that is what he did every morning, put on his hat and his boots. that was lone wolf. the first rangers came together in 1823, when the first anglo settlers came into texas. stephen f. austin led the first anglo settlers into texas. that is him in the center of this painting that comes from the library of congress. what he is doing is urging settlers to go out and kill the indians. crocco indians were a coastal tribe who had been in texas for thousands of years, but they were very large, very muscular, very tall. they smeared alligator grease on themselves to keep the mosquitoes off them. they put rattlesnake rattlers in their hair, and were said to be cannibals. so these were fearsome indians.

first time stephen f austin saw them, he recorded in this journal -- his journal, "these people must be exterminated." what he is doing is urging settlers to exterminate these indians. the first 10 rangers -- really they were proto-rangers because they were not recognized by any government at the time, were formed in 1823 to protect settlers against crocco. this was when mexico was still a part of texas. they did not do any fighting and they ran out of ammunition and food and returned to their day jobs. but that was the beginning of the rangers, 197 years ago. wereventually, the crocco exterminated in about 10 years. they cannot put up much of a fight. they did not have the ammunition or population to fight the settlers, and they were long gone. texas became an independent republic in 1836.

soon, they had to fight the comanches. the comanches, from 1750 to 1850, where the most powerful indian tribe in north america. that is because they were the greatest horsemen in north america. and this was a george caitlin painting of comanche horsemen. they were very clumsy on foot. they were short squat, weren't very much good at anything. but when they got the horse, people who would see them, white men would see them and say it was like watching a centaur. it was one beast, comanche and horse. as you can see, this comanche at the bottom of the frame, he is leaning down. what the comanches could do, they had a little strap that they rolled onto what their foot, and they would lean down

beneath the neck of the horse and fire their arrows. from there, they can fire up to 30 arrows in minutes. so the anglo settlers in the -- settlers at the time, and the rangers come over using a single shot, pistols and muskets. they would fire and have to reload. in that minute, it took them to -- time to reload and the comanches would fill them with arrows. it was not an easy fight. the comanches were called lords of the plains. they ruled the planes from colorado into texas for these many years. this was jack, a ranger captain. he had a ranger company that was one of the first companies in the american west to use the colt, revolving pistol. it was a five shot pistol that samuel colt developed and then went broke. but jack hayes and his company of rangers got hold of them and use them to fight the comanches. that's when the tide turned.

in the 1840's. no longer could the comanches wait for the rangers and others to fire their one-shot and have to reload. that began to turn the tide. jack hayes is seen as one of the greatest ranger captains of all times. he was brave, he was fierce, and he was a great tactician as well. he also led some companies in the mexican war. the mexican war was in 1846. the u.s. invaded mexico, and the rangers went and joined the army to fight against mexico. they were, at that time, army soldiers, but they stayed as soldiers. they stayed dressed as themselves, did not stay dressed as army soldiers. they stayed dressed as rangers. i want to tell you a free passage from a book by a new englander called "my confessions." some of you may have read it.

it's a terrific book. he was from new hampshire and boston, and he encountered the rangers in the mexican war. he wrote, "the rangers were the scouts of our army and a more reckless, devil may care said would be impossible to find this side of the region. blackore shirts with grease and blood. some wore red shirts, their trousers thrust into their high boots. all were armed with revolvers and bowie knives. together with their bearded faces, lean and brawny forms, swaggering manners, -- manners. they were fit representatives of the outlaws that made up the populations of the lone star state. here is where the rangers made their reputation. the mexican war had a number of war correspondents recording -- star state." here is where the rangers made their reputation. the mexican war had a number of war correspondents recording what had happened. they were enamored by the rangers.

they saved a lot of american lives. they kept american soldiers from blundering into ambushes. they fought guerrilla warfare very effectively. they were extraordinary valuable to the u.s. army. at the same time, they were noted for their atrocities. they took no prisoners. well, they took prisoners and then they killed them. they often invaded villages and wiped out the civilians in the village, for no reason except revenge. and ulysses s. grant, a later president who was then a lieutenant in the u.s. army in the mexican war, wrote a letter to his wife to be and wrote, "about all of the texans seem to pick it perfectly right to impose upon a city of a conquered city to any extent, even to murder them where the act could be covered by the dark. and how much they seem to enjoy

acts of violence." that was ulysses s grant. texas rangers in the mexican war came to be known as los diablos tejanos, the texas devils. they war that as a badge of pride. the mexicans feared the rangers because of their fighting ability and their atrocities. here is an engraving that shows samuel walker, who was on the horse, one of the most famous texas rangers fighting in the mexican war. this is the death of samuel walker in a village in mexico near the end of the war. that is not how he died, he was shot. it was a traumatic rendering of him being pierced with a lance. walker was one of the more deified rangers but was instrumental in perfecting the colt revolver into a six shooter.

it soon became the gun that won the west. so samuel walker was a pioneer in that regard. he visited colt and helped him work on this new gun. go to postwar, texas is now a state. this is the jim crow era -- i'm sorry, it is before the civil war, the 1850's. this was i cartoon that ran in harper's magazine called "young texas in repose." the figure on top is texas with the scars, sharp teeth, and the knife. he is sitting on a slave, who has been ripped, stabbed, shackled, and abused. texas was a slave state before the war. texas bordered mexico, and the underground railroad in texas ran south to mexico. if you were a slave and wanted

to escape, you probably ran to mexico. a perilous journey. once you got across the rio grand, you are free because slavery was illegal in mexico at the time. the rangers, in some cases, had slave hunting expeditions into mexico. they would go in, try to seize the slaves, bring the back the rangers did a lot of valuable things. outline,ured this where the great gunslingers of the west. he got out and practiced law and was shot to death in el paso by either a dissatisfied client or

a lover. no one is quite sure. the rangers were in sure mental in capturing a number of bad guys, including hardin. let's move to the 20th century. 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915 on the new mexico border, the rio grande valley in texas. this is a post card at the time. the men on horseback and rangers. the men on the ground are dead mexican bandits. the rangers were sent to sell texas at the time because the border was a place of great violence and of people. there was a revolution going on in mexico. at the same time there was a land boom going on in texas. the rangers were sent to keep the peace. it meant that the rangers, depending upon your sores, killed a hundreds, maybe thousands of mexicans and mexican americans, including

these for here. some of them were bad guys, some of them were abandoned. many of them, hundreds of them were only mexicans are mexican-americans who lived on land that the white people wanted. they sent the rangers into force them off the land. sometimes that meant scaring them, sometimes that meant burning them out, sometimes that meant killing them. rangers were known at the time as "common man killers." they operated what we now call "death squads." there is a list of people that the anglo powerful wanted dead, so they killed them. this was the point that the rangers became as feared by mexican-americans along the border as the kkk was feared in the deep south by black people. they were a terror to these

people. now to the anglo powerbrokers who want this land, they were a godsend. it depended on which side you are on. this is where the rangers got their reputation as a force of death along the mexican border. that is a reputation that has been impossible for them to shake. we will talk a little bit more about that when we get to the end. here is a ranger company around the turn-of-the-century. well armed with the texas flag flying in the background. later in the early 20th century there were 450 lynchings in texas. from 1885 to 1930. most of them of black men. some of them hispanic men and women. in 1919, which was known as the "red summer" because of racial violence, texas rangers conspired with police chiefs and

sheriffs in texas at the governor's order to quash the civil rights of black people. they conspired to keep them from voting. they conspired to keep them from meeting to pursue their civil rights. they blocked their mail. they instructed local gun shop owners not to sell them weapons. it was all aimed at keeping black citizens of texas from exercising their civil rights. this picture is from 1930.

in sherman, texas. the black man is in shackles and is named george hughes. he was accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. so he went to trial. this is him being led to the core house from the jail to the courthouse for the first day of his trial for assault. the rangers were brought in to protect him. for rangers. you may have heard the slogan "one ranger, one riot." this was supposedly said by a ranger who showed up one day where there was a riot going on in the local law enforcement official said there is only one of you and the ranger allegedly said, you only have one riot. that never happened. there are a number of statues, signs and monuments around texas that have the slogan, one riot, one ranger. here is what happened. george smith is on trial for assaulting a white woman. first day of trial for rangers are there to protect him. this is insurance, texas.

a farm town north of dallas. a mob formed outside the courthouse. a mob of white people. they decided to storm the courthouse to get george hughes. they got to the second floor, which is where the trial was taking place. the rangers fired some shotgun shots at them and the mob are treated. the rangers thought they had it fixed. but then the mob set fire to the courthouse. the rangers locked george hughes and ewald on the second floor to try to protect him. the courthouse was ablaze. the rangers climbed out the second floor window of the courthouse. got in a car and left town. the mob waited for the fire to burn out. they got george hughes out from the vault, through his body out the second floor window, drag it through the streets behind a car and hoisted it from a tree limb on a noose in the black part of town and set it on fire. that was your one riot, one ranger.

this is indicative of the rangers problematic history with race. here is one of the best examples. the man leaning up the tree is a ranger named j banks. he was sent to a town called mansfield, texas, which is between dallas and fort worth. the naacp, after brown v. board of education wanted to integrate texas schools. they were all white. they chose mansfield as the place to start. this is mansfield high school. they arrived with a court order, ordering local officials to enroll black students. the governor sent in the rangers to keep the peace. i know you have all seen pictures, and maybe like me you're old enough to remember in

places like arkansas and mississippi, federal troops in the national guard were deployed to make sure that black students could enroll. we have seen the photographs and the famous norman rockwell painting of a black student being led past speeding and yelling mobs to enroll in school. the rangers were there to keep black children out of the school. you see there is a figure hanging from a noose. that is a black figure hanging in effigy over the school. a mob formed outside the school carrying a sign that said black children must die. kill all blacks. it did not say blacks, you can imagine what it said. the rangers, under the governor's orders, were ordered to prohibit black students from enrolling. d with the mob.

j banks, because of that. mansfield and a week later in texarkana, texas, because of this photograph, which circulated worldwide, became the face of the opposition to integration in texas. this photograph ran in newspapers all across the country. we will get back to that in a minute. a couple more things to talk about and then we will deal with the rangers in general. this is captain alfred ali who is a distinguished ranger in south texas. was one of the toughest rangers ever. how do i know he was one of the toughest ever? when a texas firemen patrol wrote his wife a traffic ticket for a burnt out tail light, he went in and he said his wife was lying, so he pistol whipped the highway patrolman.

he would pistol whip or slap you. that was how he handled people he did not like. in 1967, there was a farm workers strike. they were hispanic and paid maybe $.50 an hour to pick melons. they lived in shacks. they had no medical care. to get water in the fields they , had to bend down and drink the puddles from the ground. so there were aligning themselves with cesar chavez forces out of california. the melon growers asked them to bring in the rangers. he did. they broke the strike by harassing the strikebreakers by beating them, by arresting them for no reason. by holding their faces inches from speeding freight trains that were barreling through town.

and they were successful. the rangers were strike rakers -- breakers in many cases. they broke steelworkers strikes, coal miners strikes. they even at one point broke a cowboy strike up in the panhandle of texas. this is one of the most famous in 1967, led by the captain. and later in several courts and the supreme court and findings from the civil rights commission's censored him. in his defense, he was just a man out of his past. he once said these doggone civil rights is the dammed thing i ever heard of. he was an old-school ranger. when he retired he was hailed as one of the greatest ranch captains ever. he settled back in his hometown of south texas. one day he went to the store to buy a jug of water. the young hispanic clerk rang up a price of $1.75. the captain thought it should be $1.45.

he slapped the clerk and pulled his pistol on him. and it was the captain until the end. one more ranger anecdote. this is henry lee lucas. he was at one time the most famous serial killer in american history. this was in the late 1970's, mid 1980's. he supposedly killed, perhaps 300 people across the united states. this was a guy who only had one good eye, his right eye. he had an iq of about 85. he had a fifth-grade education. yet, he was able to go all over the country killing hundreds of people, never leaving a single clue. not a fingerprint, not a hair,

not a shell casing that could be matched to him, not a tire track, nothing. not a witness, ever. but the rangers had him in captivity. he began confessing to these crimes. police officers would come in from all over the country and lucas would confess to unsolved murders, so they would clear these murders. every time they would clear a murder and confessed to a crime the rangers would put a pin and -- put a pin in their map. they ran from coast to coast. from texas to canada, from california to new england. between 200 and 300 workers this -- murders this man confessed to killing. the murders were attributed to him.

the rangers had the deadliest, most dangerous man in america in captivity. they were very proud of that. a lot of the rangers got a lot of glory out of that. in 1985, the dallas newspaper ran an expose and showed that lucas could not have committed these murders. he may have committed three of them. his mother, his common-law wife and a woman he worked for. but the newspaper proved and later evidence proved that he , could not have been in these places when he claimed to have committed these murders. what later came out was that he was allowed to see the files on these murders before he confessed to them. that is how he knew to say, yes i killed the woman in this place. yes i used a knife or yes i used a gun. but it was all a hoax. when this was exposed, the rangers said -- we do not know

it was a hoax. all we did was make lewis available. we didn't investigate his whereabouts, we were his custodian. we cannot have known he was lying. we do not probe his whereabouts, his background, anything like that. that's what the rangers said. when i was researching this book, i found the rangers record -- henry lee lucas records in the state archives. no one ever looked at them. what i found in those archives were proof that there rangers were lying. they did know it was all a hoax. they didn't know lucas committed -- could not have committed these crimes. they had an extensive investigation into the whereabouts and they knew it was impossible that he killed someone in shreveport, louisiana when he lived in maryland, or killed someone in baytown texas when he was working in jacksonville, florida. they knew all this but they kept it secret. why?

i don't know. i think it was because they did not want to admit that this was a hoax. they did not want to admit they played along. peer is the problem with that beyond it being public responsibility. every time a murder was cleared attributed toor henry lee lucas, the investigation stopped. that means that these 200 plus murders that he confessed to for dozens of years while lucas was believed to be the suspect, no one was looking into these cases. these killers were walking free. and the rangers allowed that to happen. there is the book. a couple of things i want to add and then we will go to questions.

remember the photo of j. banks leaning against the tree and front of a high school with a black effigy was hanging. he was the model for a statue of a texas ranger that was completed in 1960. why was he the model, because he was the good-looking guy, the sculptor said he looked like a ranger. so the sculpture, the statue was made. it was 12 feet high on its base. the base said one riot, one ranger. the statue itself was placed in the early 1960's in the lobby of love field airport in dallas. which is the main city which is the equivalent of midway airport in chicago. this is home port for southwest airlines. and it stood in the lobby of dallas love field since the early 1960's.

i am an old white guy so i never paid much attention to that statue. let's remember that j. banks was the face of official opposition into integration of texas schools in the 1950's. how would you feel if you were an african-american getting off a plane in dallas and that is one of the first things you see, the statue of j. banks? maybe your parents or grandparents could not enroll in a school of texas because of what they were doing. within days of my book coming out, the city of dallas took down the statue of j. banks. i don't know where it is now, but they were alarmed at the message that the statue may have sent. this was at the same time a lot of confederate statues and statues of columbus were coming down across the south and across the nation. at the same time we were having,

and are still having a debate about police brutality. going back to what the rangers did a long the border in the early parts of the 20th century, i have said before, the rangers did not admit to brutality, but they perfected it along the border in the early parts of the 21st century they were very , rabid effective practitioners of police brutality for a long time. this is become part of the discussion. now, there have been suggestions that the texas rangers baseball team should change its name. the colonists from the washington post said the texas rangers baseball team is having none of it. there are many discussions taking place and museums across the state and elsewhere that glorify the rangers and don't

take into account the histories of hispanics, blacks, native americans, and i think it's really important, as the rangers come up on their 200th anniversary in 2023, and since this is texas there will be a lots of pageantry and celebration, i think it's really important that the rangers face up to their history. for many years, their image has been promulgated by this propaganda factory that they have operated. all these tv shows we saw about the rangers in the 1950's and 1960's. if the producers want cooperation from the rangers they had to get script approval. the rangers only approved scripts that showed the rangers in a flattering way.

now i think it's really important, as we are approaching his 200th anniversary, for the rangers to acknowledge the other side of their history. let's talk about the honor, the courage and all the good things they have done, but let's also talk about the history of hispanics and blacks as a rangers,relates to the the natives and other people. i think it's really important to do for a number of reasons. it's fairer. to give voice to people who have not had a lot of voice. and i think it makes the rangers appear stronger as an institution. i don't think it diminishes them at all. if we start talking about, for example, the civil war and slavery and facing up to what happened, does that make us weaker as a nation? no. it makes it stronger. i hope they take this opportunity to do that. they are not sharing their plans with me at this point because they were not that happy with the book in many ways. but i hope that's what happens.

that is my history. i'm happy to answer any questions. >> that was awesome. my son is sitting here with me. we are both sitting here widemouthed, particularly when he talked about bringing people within inches of speeding trains. as i'm listening to you, and anybody who knows me knows that i love following the stories of world war ii, but these clearly sound like third reich-esque tactics. things that we almost taken for granted that would almost never have been in the knighted states with a stalin-esque theme. you had a litany of things that in the time from

exterminating indians to the mexican war to the evolution of the colt revolver. it may be inadvertent for your point in terms of how this happened, but given all the tactics that were used, and the conversations going on today, you just mentioned that you think they really have to come forth and fess up to their past. do you think that's possible? do you think they will be able to do that? doug: that is a great question. to preface it, think we have to -- to preface it, i think we have to be aware of what's called presentism. judging the acts of someone to

-- 200 years ago by our present standards. we have to acknowledge that texas in the 1800s and 1900s was a wild and violent place. the rangers were reacting to that. it was tough men in a tough time. that has to be acknowledged in this discussion. but, there is no doubt that the rangers were, for much of their existence, acting under orders from, and on behalf of of the -- under orders from, and on behalf of the white anglo power structure in texas. and that meant wiping out indians, mexicans and quashing the civil rights of blacks, and looking the other way when people were lynched, that is what they were there to do and told to do. do i think they will acknowledge that? i am a little bit hopeful.

the reason i am hopeful is, because i am starting to hear from those who are the official custodians of ranger history. i cannot be any more specific than that at this point because it's not ready to be released yet. i am hopeful that it will be soon. i think they are feeling the pressure. another reason i am hopeful, there is a state texas museum in austin called the bullet museum. a few years ago, they put up an exhibit of violence on the border. it was very graphic and it explained the rangers roll and the role of others. that was a real change. i'm hoping we see more of that. i think the rangers, and those who have been the custodians of their image will realize they are out of step.

and texas is becoming a majority/minority state. i think the citizens are going to insist on that. i think the national climate brings that to bear as well. we are revisiting this all over the country, except maybe parts of the deep south. i am from the deep south so i can acknowledge that. it is happening. it's happening slowly. but this is a little bit of a switch. just to give you an example. a different metric. there have never been many texas rangers. right now, there are only 160 texas rangers in the state of texas in the state of 30 million people. most people in texas have never seen a ranger, despite the large image. four of them are women. eight of them are black and 34 are hispanic.

they did not have any women rangers until 1993. they did not have black rangers until 1988, that was after an naacp complaint. it's changing, but it's changing slowly and its tardy. we would like to see it further along, but it is changing. it is a long answer to your question to say, yes i am hopeful. what i bet on it, probably not. >> how cooperative were they, were texas rangers? you mentioned about the keepers of the flame. how cooperative where they with you in researching this? how long did it take you to compile this? doug: individual rangers were cooperative. individual rangers operate often independently. there is a prominent lack of

bureaucracy within the rangers. the individual ranger does what he thinks he needs to do. for example, i spent the day with a ranger in southeast texas. great guy, terrific ranger, terrific law man and a credit to the agency. the rangers officials would not cooperate with me at all. the book took five years to research and write. i spent all five of those years trying to get cooperation out of the rangers officials. emails, phone calls, letters, personal appeals, nothing worked. they wanted nothing to do with me. the only comment they have had on the book so far is that historians will judge its veracity. they have not said anything else. the rangers have a professional operation and they have changed

dramatically. they have standards and training and they are a professional law enforcement organization and a really good one in many ways. but the rangers are under what is called a texas department of public safety and that agency is not known for its transparent. -- for its transparency, with me or any other journalist. so it's a problem. i would like to see more transparency, but i'm not too optimistic about that. >> you clearly told us some anecdotes about individuals and activities. were there things that you found in your research that you just simply could not put in the book? either they were just too heinous, you cannot verify? there were things that you had a whoa moment, or i'm not trying to touch this one moment?

doug: i was interested in george hughes being led to his or date. -- his court date in chains. there is a photograph of his charred corpse being hung from a tree. i couldn't put that in the book. there were so many incidents that at some point you just have to say, can i put another atrocity in here? am i piling on too much? there were atrocities on both sides. the comanche indians were notorious for torturing anglo settlers. there were atrocities by the mexican forces in the mexican war. it was not one-sided. but to answer your question more directly, it was more a manner -- more a matter of volume than individual incidents. i could have gone on and on and talking about executions and atrocities and war crimes and at some point you just have to say, i hope i've made my point and

move on to the next one. >> we have some questions coming in. this is from somebody in the audience. a fellow floridian. i appreciate your work on this issue. the question -- there has been a long issue of "night riding" as a tool of enforcing -- in the -- enforcing white supremacy in the antebellum time for reconstruction. there is a lot of evidence that people involved are public officials, including police officers by day and violent vigilantes by night. i wondered if you talk about the links between the rangers, who stateon largely as the for extrajudicial activity. for example, did they legitimize behavior throughout texas or the rest of the south? doug: it was no secret that in

the 1920's, 1930's there were many rangers who were members of the kkk. night riders were also called night cappers. every now and then they would arrest a few of them and every now and then the rangers would move in and arrest innocent people who were involved in racial disturbances but they , rarely went to trial. it was extremely rare for someone who was involved in a lynching to be prosecuted. going back to the sherman lynching where the mob turned , down the court house the rangers ended up arresting nine people. only one of them went to trial. he was convicted of arson. he served a very brief sentence. if we are looking at the time of the 1920's, 1930's when racial violence, 1910s, when racial

violence was across texas and across the south, the rangers did very little to stop it. it's true, many of the night riders were law enforcement officials. it was a terrible time. law enforcement was complicit in hand with that. at one point, the national director of the naacp, a white man came to texas to try to talk to the governor about racial violence. violence against black people in texas saying we want some protection. the governor refused to see him. he was in austin. he saw the rangers, the second in command, the assistant general, and he asked for protection because he believed his life was in danger. he was a white man but was the head of the naacp. he said i feel like i'm in

danger here in austin and can you protect me? the assistant general refused. he walked out onto the streets of austin were he was accosted by three public officials who beat him savagely on the streets of austin and put him on a train to st. louis and told him never come back to texas again. these were public officials, they were not prosecuted. they were hailed as heroes in texas. that is the way it worked. >> where the rangers and act of military unit during the civil war? if so, did they stay together? doug: there were some rangers who became confederate soldiers. there is one particularly famous unit and is part of the confederate army. there were other rangers who control the frontier, and i guess you call them because i

quasi-rangers. their purpose was to protect settlers against indian attacks. the rangers only reformed in the 1870's as an official unit. >> why did you undertake this project? when you did, did you have a good idea of what was going on, or were you surprised at what you were finding? doug: i have been carrying the idea out of my head for a long time. i was a newspaper reporter at the dallas morning news for more than 30 years. i had been planning to do a story about the rangers and never really got around to it. i had written another book about a texas character who is a racketeer. he moved to las vegas and started the world series of poker. after i wrote that, my publisher

said we want a big texas book. so i said come after the alamo, what is bigger than the rangers? i set about thinking i would just do a comprehensive history of the rangers thinking it would take me a couple years. i badly underestimated the amount of material i would have to go through. i found that i started poking around and found stories behind the myths. a lot of the myths began to fall apart right away as soon as i began poking into them. i want to say that many other scholars who had written about rangers' atrocities on the border or in the mexican war, or elsewhere, and i was not the first to get there. but in the other cases, it had been done in a fairly discreet way. they had written about one small piece of history or one geographical part of texas, or something like that.

what i wanted to do was put it all together across the nearly 200 years and see what it looked like as a whole. i began assembling downhole. that is what surprised me. how every time, every era i looked at what the rangers had done. and, again, they did a lot of good. i have to keep saying that. once you start looking behind legends and taking the myths apart, some pretty bad stories began to emerge. i begin to see how the rangers, again and again, covered them up. they not only covered them up, but to these terrible incidents and remanufactured them, transformed them into stories of heroism. it was uncanny. it was really surprising to me. that is one reason it took me five years to pull all of this

together. >> how has this been received in texas? beside the fact that they took down the statue. what has the reception been? doug: because of covid-19 -- and i am here in pittsburgh, i have not been back to texas yet. i don't know if i will be shot. i am getting lots of support and lots of really good emails. the reviews have been great. sales have been good. at the same time, all i have to do is go to the book's page on amazon.com and there are plenty of people lining up to tell me what an idiot i am and all of that. i'm not a real texan. someone wrote the other day that i hate texans, which will come as a surprise to my wife and two children who were all born in texas. i spent half my life in texas. but i would say on the whole, more than on the whole, the reception has been very good. the newspaper and radio coverage has been very encouraging.

i think it taps in to a recognition that many people in texas and elsewhere have that it's time to look at this. there are some who don't want to talk about this. they do not want to examine the myths and the legends. i am dismissed as another woke liberal who wants to poke holes in heroes. that is not the case. what i wanted to do was, as i said earlier, is try to tell the whole story, because i think that's really important. are ever worried about your ego, you always have the internet. trust me. the internet will always make sure you get that. the protagonist said he joined

at age 16. doug: the first part of the question was? >> in the song of texas rangers , the protagonist that he joined at age 16. is that realistic? doug: that is realistic. there were some at the age of 14 and 16. it was a very loose and is asian then. if you knew the captain, if you were a good horseman and a good shot, if just wanted to go out and fight people and chase indians, if you are immune to danger, you could be a ranger. certainly, there were very young rangers. there were some older rangers, too. that is all the requirements that were in place for many years. it was only until the 1930's, the mid-1930's that the rangers began to adopt standards and

requirements and training to make the rangers into a professional force. before that it was if you're in , the right place at the right time and knew the right people and wanted to work for low pay in bad conditions but had the title of ranger then you were there. >> i don't think you are a woke liberal, i think you have done a great piece of research and history. i applaud you. i have this on order. it's a fascinating read. i have been looking forward to this. i want to thank you very much for joining us. thank you for taking the time. think your wife for being the technical advisor behind-the-scenes. good luck with this book. i know it's already on the bestseller lists. but good luck with this and thank you for joining us. i want to thank everyone else for being in the audience tonight. tvthis is american history

on c-span3, where each weekend we feature 48 hours of programs exploring our nation's past. >> in 1969, yale university opened its doors to women for the first time in its history. women book yellow needs she explains the challenges women faced and the continuing struggle for equality in education. here is a preview. so let's turn back to 1969, when those first women that students arrived at yale. gail needs women is the story of those first women undergraduates. they arrived to a campus that had been all-male for the previous 268 years. they were outnumbered seven to one by the male classmates, so don't think coeducation is 50-50 or even close to it like it is now, because yale put in a

gender quota that limited number of women graduates and wanted to continue to admit as many men as possible. those women students didn't have faculties to look out for them. tenured professors, three were women. but of the dozens of women i interviewed in writing this book , i was struck again and again by their persistence, by their courage, and by their creativity. 1959,think of september in some ways it has been reminding me of our time right now when lots of individuals were speaking out against long-standing injustice. the vietnam war was raging and the protests against it, the black power movement was changing how the country saw race. some riots happened just before the women students arrived, showing the discrimination

faced. it is that moment that the first women undergraduates at yale arrived. the women's movement had barely started just then. to give you some of that context , just 7% of u.s. doctors in 1969 were women. 2%t 3% of u.s. lawyers, just of the members of congress. discrimination against women college students, faculty, and administrators was perfectly legal. if you think yale was the only college that was turning women away at that time, you should think again. top-tier is the entire of american colleges and university with rare exceptions. seven of the ivy league schools and two publican diversity's. it reads like a list of who's who.

dartmouth, duke, all the way to wesleyan, and yale. itn neil finally announces is -- when yale finally announces it is going coed, it is shocking and the new york times put it on the front pages. >> learn more about the expenses of the first women students at yale here on american history tv. she is the creator at the american resume of history. let me begin with the pandemic and how it has impacted the museum and your division in particular. remotelye been working since march. we began thinking about the pandemic in january. we are a division of medical historians and we followed the news